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Encouraging healthy, sustainable diets and our 1 year anniversary by Keira

By Louca-Mai Brady,

We had our fourth in-person meeting on Saturday, 11th March – and our one-year birthday party!

We started off with pizza, wedges and salad for lunch and followed with a memory icebreaker game where we had to remember moves from the previous people, and it was quite hard 😂.

Then Rebecca, a researcher from the University of Hertfordshire who came and talked to us before, gave us an update on the project she’s working on about children and young people’s food and drink spending.

Afterwards we talked to Claire, another UH researcher, about a project we’ve been working on with her about different ways to change aspects of the ‘food system’ to make people’s diet better for the planet and for their health. In our last meeting we had talked about the three facets of the food cycle we will work on: retail, catering and community. So we shared ideas of how food could be less UUF (Unhealthy, Unsustainable food) and more HSF (Healthy, Sustainable food). We came up with availability (removing UUF foods, moving them to less visible places), size (reducing portions of UUF, making HSF portions bigger), promotions (marketing HSF products and asking for healthier donations to food banks), price (increasing prices of UUF and making HSF cheaper) and giving information (classes, leaflets, labels). Claire said:

“I have worked with the group a few times now, but I am always surprised by how engaged they are and how much thought they put into the questions we ask them.”

Some of us, including me, started planning a podcast that we’re going to make (more information about this coming soon!) and suggested ways to improve a research summary Louca-Mai had written.

We stopped for two birthday cake breaks to celebrate a YPAG member’s birthday and the first year of our group. Happy birthday Herts YPAG 🍰!

 

At a previous meeting we’d started some work with Terry, a member of the university team, to make an animation about our group, and we did some more work on this and started planning our film.

 

This session was just like the other in-person sessions, really fun. We had good food, ideas for the researchers and started planning for the future of Herts YPAG.

I love being a YPAG member as it is enjoyable. We always have new members, interesting projects, excellent food, and parties. I am also looking forward to the future of YPAG as we have a lot to plan out, for example, our podcast, an animation film and more pizza🍕!